Michigan

Editorial: Culture wars at GRCC

It isn't hard to find pressing business for Grand Rapids Community College trustees.
For starters: helping more students afford college, retraining legions of unemployed West Michigan residents people for new jobs, finding money for building improvements, and addressing an archaic teacher pay system.

So it is disappointing that one trustee is aiming instead at a very different target: dragging GRCC into America's culture wars.

Richard Ryskamp, voted onto the seven-member board this summer, opted this week to criticize the schools' diversity speaker series, objecting to the inclusion of '60s activist Angela Davis and Eric Alva, an Iraq military veteran who wants to change the Pentagon's Don't Ask Don't Tell policy.

An institution of higher learning should not restrict the free exchange of ideas. Trustees should encourage free speech and free thought on campus and promote rigorous civil debate, not to censor it.

GRCC's diversity series, supported by many distinguished corporate supporters, has brought to West Michigan dozens of provocative people over its 15-year history. The speaker roster for this school year also includes Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center, Prince Cedza Dlamini, who crusades against hunger poverty and disease in Africa, and Brigitte Cazalis-Collins, who works to end child sex trafficking.

Mr. Ryskamp, a Caledonia physician, said during his campaign that he is worried about conservative values not being represented in public education.

But instead of fostering a potentially constructive discussion of how to broaden the speaker roster and topics, Mr. Ryskamp chose the narrow, divisive route, ruing that Ms. Davis and Mr. Alva were invited and accusing the college of trying to "promote" bad values.

GRCC is an institution with 30,000 students, 700 faculty members, a $90 million budget and a mission to help lead West Michigan into the next decade. The college doesn't have time to waste on whether someone who made news in the 1960s fits one trustee's definition of a proper speaker. Or to engage in fruitless political discussions of which speakers are great Americans because they fit one trustee's definition of values.

This country, and this community, are bigger than that. So are the issues facing Grand Rapids Community College.

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